


Memento Mori

by Donna_Immaculata



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: 17th Century, Action/Adventure, F/M, First Time, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-17
Updated: 2013-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-02 17:20:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1059512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The 17th century turns out to be less romantic than Martha thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memento Mori

**Author's Note:**

  * For [subjunctive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/subjunctive/gifts).



It wasn’t his fault, really, he couldn’t help it. It was just… he was so tall, and every time he stood close to her, leaning against the TARDIS or against any convenient wall, looming over her, looking down at her with that odd expression of teasing tenderness in his eyes, her heart would skip beat. She couldn’t help that, either. 

 

“What’s it going to be this time, Martha Jones? Past, present or future?” He was dancing around the TARDIS console, all but making love to it with his hands and eyes.

“Past! You promised me something romantic for a change, remember? We’ve only just come back from that 63rd century amusement arcade, and the asteroid shower on – hold on, I’ve got it – Frim-A-Xixiantoforgous Beta happened in what is technically my present. See? I’m getting the hang of talking about time travel without getting confused when it happened… was happening… is happening. Don’t laugh!”

“Past it is then! Destination: the Earth. Time:” He turned the handle of a shiny control and sent a disc spinning across the top of the console. “Something romantic, let’s see… Not too far back, perhaps… Let’s say the late 17th century. Restoration comedy! We can go and see a play with Nell Gwyn, perhaps the king will pop by, too, he’s a big fan of hers. The Scientific Revolution! Isaac Newton – he came up with the cat flap, you know, had a very affectionate pair of moggies who insisted on sleeping in the bed with us-“

“What?”

But he didn’t appear to hear her and prattled on. “Ooh, and you’re gonna love the dresses. I think there’s a red and silver gown in the third-largest TARDIS wardrobe, with a lot – and I mean a lot of ribbons and frilly things. You should try it on, we can present you at court.”

There was a sudden pause as the TARDIS dropped heavily to the ground and scraped screechingly across cobblestones. 

“You really should look into the braking mechanism,” said Martha, after she’d picked herself up. “I get the feeling it can be optimised.”

“Come on!” He was already standing by the door, with beaming eyes and a radiant smile. “Aren’t you curious what’s waiting outside?”

“What about my dress?”

“What dress- Oh! Yes, of course. Off you hop, then, tart yourself up. Don’t forget, the current fashion is to look as déshabillé as possible whilst wearing a lot of expensive fabrics.”

Martha did her best with the bodice lacings, drapes, frills, ribbons and a bustle that she suspected of shifting when she walked, giving her the appearance of a lopsided duck that had fallen into a bucket of glittery paint. Despite all that, she rather liked the look of herself in the mirror, especially after she topped up the outfit with a fabulous wide-brimmed hat with red plumes. 

“What do you think?” In a gown like that, it was impossible not to make an entrance, and Martha had certainly made one if the expression on the Doctor’s face was any indication. He was gazing at her slightly open-mouthed, for once frozen in motionlessness. Martha felt an embarrassing giggle rise up her throat and twirled around to hide it. Unfortunately, twirling was a feat impossible to accomplish when draped in brocade and wearing heeled slippers, and Martha felt herself stumble as the heavy fabric wrapped itself treacherously around her legs. And then, for the first time in her life, she literally fell into a man’s arms. The Doctor had crossed the distance between them in a mere second and caught her.

“I think,” he said, his mouth very close to her face, his arms like steel around her waist, “you need more practice.”

“I see you didn’t bother getting dressed.” Martha was too confused to be embarrassed. On top of everything else, he also smelled good. 

“What?” He looked down on himself. “I’m not naked, am I?” He let go of her. “That happened once before, you know.”

“What happened?”

“Me, forgetting to put on any clothes and walking out there naked. Of course, that was when Jack was here, so it wasn’t entirely my fault.” Martha stared at him, a whole gallery of images flashing up before her mind’s eye, but he ignored her gormless gaping and pushed open the door. “Welcome to the Restoration Age, Martha Jones!”

“Is this really it? Am I really going to see Charles II?” Martha bounced past him, into a crowded lane soaked in greasy odours and shrill noises. She found herself in the middle of a crowd of people who were decidedly less colourfully dressed than she was. A warty-faced man shot her a scrutinising look over the rim of the bottle from which he was drinking. Martha turned around and glared at the Doctor, who had the decency to look a bit sheepish. 

“Well… Not quite. I think I didn’t quite get the time quite right,” he admitted. “This is the reign of Charles I rather than Charles II.”

“Oh! Ah well…” Only a few decades off, she’d seen worse.

“And a, for lack of a better word, artisans’ quarters, not the royal court.”

“I guessed that much.”

“And France rather than England… Sorry about that.”

“That’s a shame. I was really looking forward to seeing the Cavaliers in all their glory.”

“Look on the bright side: at least you don’t have to watch the Puritans in all their gloom. They banned Christmas, you know.”

“Yes, but not quite yet. What is there to do in France?”

“What there is always to do in France. Wenching, wining…”

“Yeah, not so big on the wenching. Who’s king?”

“Louis XIII. And Anne of Austria is his Queen consort. Only she’s not from Austria, she’s from the House of Habsburg, the Spanish line, they called her Anne of Austria, and she was beautiful, the Duke of Buckingham himself was mad about her, and he was quite the connoisseur of beauty, killed by a Puritan of course… We can go and meet the three musketeers, how about that?”

“They weren’t real. Oh my god, were they real? Can we really go and meet them? We cannot, can we?”

The Doctor’s face lit up in that smile of his. “We can always try!” He grabbed her hand and pulled her with him, steering her skilfully through the throng, along the alleyway, around the corner into another street, and another, until they arrived in a square populated by quite a different, though by no means less noisy kind of people. 

A crowd of young men, all of them be-moustached and be-caped and every single one of them wearing a plumed hat and carrying a sword. Prancing around like cockerels, they shouted abuse at each other and at passers-by, they twirled they moustaches like cartoon villains and clanked their swords, and they stared at Martha as she and the Doctor came closer, openly and shamelessly. The looks weren’t threatening, yet she instinctively walked closer to the Doctor and took his arm, for once accepting the role of the damsel in distress.

“Are these supposed to be the famed musketeers?” she whispered in the direction of the Doctor’s ear. “They’re horrible. I thought they were noble and elegant and, you know, _hot_. But they’re like a bunch of blokes from Peckham on a stag night.”

“Yes, history can be disappointing like that,” he whispered back. “Good afternoon, messieurs les chevaliers!” he shouted out in passing. “Please, do not interrupt your afternoon’s business on our account. We are just on our way to see his Eminence the Cardinal.”

A frisson ran through the crowd whilst the half-drunk, testosterone-ridden young men tried to ascertain whether or not they had just been insulted and if the tall stranger with the beautiful lady on his arm deserved the honour of being challenged to a duel. Before the mob could make up its collective mind, however, a scream pierced the air that sent a jolt through Martha. She was running even before she realised what happened, her reactions honed after the experiences of the past few weeks. 

The Doctor was running too, must faster and lighter on his feet than she was in the long brocade monstrosity. When she eventually reached him, he was kneeling by the side of a man in a musketeer’s uniform on whose chest a blood stain rapidly blossomed. Martha fell to her knees, too, mindless of the dress, and snatched the Doctor’s hands away. “Careful with the blood,” she snarled at him. “I bet they’re all riddled with diseases, venereal and otherwise. You wouldn’t want to contract a 17th century strain of syphilis or the black plague.” Even as she told him off, she was pulling out surgical gloves from the reticule that dangled from her wrist. She was aware of shouting, running and some very heated dialogue going on behind and above her, but the Doctor could take care of the talking. She focused on the job at hand.

The man was bleeding profusely from a narrow wound to his chest that looked as though it might have been inflicted with a dagger. Working quickly and deftly, Martha unbuttoned his doublet and shirt and attempted to quench the flow of blood with the sterile bandages which she had likewise brought along in her reticule. She had taken to carrying basic first-aid items with her whenever possible, it was amazing how often she got the chance to use them. Even as she was bandaging him up, however, she knew that he would not live. The wound was too deep, too precise, the haemorrhaging too strong. 

Behind her, the Doctor had got himself in trouble with the furious crowd. 

“Stop it! Stop it AT ONCE!” he bellowed eventually. Martha turned around and saw him keep a mob of angry soldiers in check with a sonic screwdriver and the power of his personality. “Your comrade has been killed and will be avenged. But right now, you must let this lady do her job, she is a medic from distant lands in Arabia, and she knows many secrets of healing-“ he broke off, suddenly aware that he wasn’t talking to a group of gullible peasants.

“Martha?” he said under his breath. “When I tell you when – RUN!”

They were very much out of breath, panting and gasping for air. Martha had long lost her heeled slippers and she felt sure that her bustle had shifted irrevocably into an awkward position over her liver where it remained stuck. The Doctor was gasping, but he was laughing, too. “You were brilliant, Martha!” he managed at last. “The way you dropped that silk drape and those fake gems – never underestimate the avarice of your pursuers, especially if they’re drunk. I saw them fight over that handful of glitter.”

“A man has died,” Martha panted, clutching a side stitch. “A man in my care.”

He stopped laughing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish there’d been something I could do. You’re a good doctor, Martha Jones, if you say the wound was fatal, it was fatal. Those men duel all the time, he was just another casualty of the machismo spirit.”

“No,” Martha said slowly as impressions reasserted themselves. “No, that wound wasn’t inflicted in a duel, it wasn’t a sword wound. Too narrow. Wrong angle, too, I think, even though I wouldn’t swear that under oath.”

The Doctor became very still. “What are you saying?”

“Only that it wasn’t a sword wound. It might have been a dagger, they carry daggers with them, misericordiae, you know.”

“Was that what it was?” he whispered.

Martha hesitated barely a fraction of a second. “No.” She shook her head and unclenched the fist in which she had been clutching a torn piece of bandage. She unfolded the crinkled fabric and held it out to him. Long, curved, blood-stained, slightly fluorescent fibres glinted against the white material. Thin as they were, they were also sharp and firm, as the Doctor realised when he tried to pick one up and cut himself. He licked the blood off his finger.

“Doctor!” Martha said. “Do you know how dangerous this is? Not to mention unhygienic.”

He waved her warning aside. “One thousand years and still going.” He picked the fibre up again, more carefully this time, and held it up against the light. Then, he pulled out his sonic screwdriver and scanned it. “Martha, you were right. That man did not die in a duel. Not in a duel with another human, anyway.”

“What is it?” She had stepped closer while they talked, and she only now realised that from where he stood he had an excellent view of her fashionably exposed décolletage. Martha’s head snapped up, quite despite herself, and there he was, staring down at her cleavage with an expression on his face that she’d never seen there before.

He blinked and looked her in the eyes. “Oh, Martha,” he breathed, and her head spun, her blood pounded in her ears so forcefully that she wasn’t even sure he had really spoken.

Five seconds – _one_ second longer, and Martha was sure that he would have kissed her then and there, mysterious extra-terrestrial fibres be damned. Had not a fat fishmonger pushed past them, wheezing and hallooing and cursing, and the spell was broken. 

The Doctor cleared his throat, all business-like. “I’ve seen something like this before, but where?” He began pacing around in circles, pulling at his hair and talking to himself in a continuous stream of babble. “… something primeval, an atavist creature that had lived on Earth since the dinosaurs or even before them, like the Silurians? Possible. We shouldn’t automatically assume it’s an alien creature. The Beast of Gévaudan? Too early, it won’t appear for another hundred years, and it never made it to Paris. What else, what else? There were legends of werewolves in France, but a werewolf rips out its victims throat, eviscerates him. This is a clean kill. Martha!” He stopped in his tracks. “When you examined the wound – what did it look like?”

“It looked like a stab wound,” said Martha, not quite sure what he was driving at.

“Yes, but… what kind of stab wound? A vicious one? An angry one? A… a… professional one?”

“A clinical one, I would say.” Martha frowned, thinking back to the hectic three minutes or so she’d spend with the dying man. “Very clean, very efficient. Meant to kill instantly, with the minimum of pain. A mercy kill almost.”

They stared at each other and then: “Oh!” The Doctor cried out. “ _Misericordia_! Oh, Martha, you got it right straightaway!”

“Mercy kill! The dagger!” A wave of excitement surged through her and she leapt into his arms, hugging him as he twirled her around to the great amusement of several onlookers. “Is that really it? Mercy killing?”

“Looks like it,” he nodded, his brown eyes dancing with joy. “I think we’ve got the motive. Now, all we need is the means and the opportunity, and the case is solved. Why, Mademoiselle Jones, will you do me the honour of embarking on this exciting Murder Mystery Tour in Absolutist France with me?”

She took the hand he was holding out to her and dropped a curtsey. “But of course, Monsieur Smith. It will be an honour and a pleasure.”

Paris’ reputation as the capital of romance, Martha realised after a few hours of struggling along muddy streets, was grossly overrated. She had bartered an embroidered handkerchief against a pair of sabots which were much more solid than the flimsy slippers had been, yet at the same time very uncomfortable if one wasn’t used to walking in wooden shoes. Which she wasn’t. The hemline of her magnificent gown was coated into a thick paste the ingredients of which Martha did not care to examine, the hellish bustle had come lose again and wobbled with every step she took, and the hat had taken to scratching. The Doctor’s step was as confident as ever, but he had become quite taciturn. They had gone back to the scene of crime, and the Doctor had succeeded in separating one of the musketeers from the herd, plied him with wine and let Martha, who at that point had been in high spirits and felt desirable and beautiful, charm him into answering questions. It turned out the death they had witnessed had not been the first one of its kind. Several musketeers had been killed in a similar fashion, as well as members of the Cardinal’s guard. After weeks of mutual carnage, with both sides blaming the respective other for the killings, nothing had been resolved. As the story unfolded, the Doctor had looked increasingly incredulous, whilst Martha became quite frustrated, especially since their designated witness divided his attention between the wine, the food and her breasts, and it took them a long time to extract any useful information from him. Eventually, they left him snoring in drunken stupor with his head on the table (“The chevalier will take care of the bill,” the Doctor told the landlord as he pushed to the door) and departed.

“What now?” asked Martha when they stopped for no reason whatsoever at a street corner. The air smelled of dusk: crisp and smoky. She braced herself against a wall and adjusted the heavy sabot on her left foot. “You’re not giving up, are you?”

“Never!” He gave the impression of a man coming out from water as he took a deep breath and looked around. “Jamais! We never give up, never surrender, as a friend of mine used to say!”

“Good!”

“We should get some sleep, however,” he said. “No point wearing ourselves out, you’ve got to be alert to fight monsters. That cabaret across the road looks slightly less flea-infested than the others around here, let’s ask the good host for a chamber for the night.”

“How are we going to pay?” Martha whispered as they followed the host up a creaking staircase and along a narrow hallway. “I'm running out of fake gems and silky hankies.”

“There’s still plenty of fabric left,” the Doctor whispered back, looking her up and down from the side. “You can afford to lose some more.”

There it was again, the tone of voice that sent shivers down her spine. Martha remembered the first night she’d ever spent in his company, a few weeks ago and many lifetimes ago, when he took her along on the one trip he had promised her and brought her to Elizabethan England. They had shared a room then too, but she had been much more naïve, much more hopeful, not quite so resigned to the role he had assigned her.

The room was small, but clean. Martha walked over to the window and looked out into the street that hummed with life. Paris. She’d always wanted to go to Paris, preferably on a romantic minibreak in the company of a rich and enamoured boyfriend who would take her to a romantic hotel in the Quartier Latin, who would ply her with croissants and café au laits in picturesque street cafés and with wine in smoky jazz bars. 

Well. There she was. On the hunt for a murderous extra-terrestrial, in the company of a penniless and detached alien, who took her to a poky hostel with no romantic object in mind whatsoever and who seemed more interested in chasing an unknown monster through the alleyways than strolling hand in hand with her through them. Admittedly, she’d had her share of wine at dinner, but that was because he had plied the musketeer, not her.

“Pardon?” She realised that he was saying something. “I was lost in thought.”

“I said they’ve brought up your bathwater,” said the Doctor, pointing to the bathtub that two servants were putting down in front of the fireplace. “I thought you might like to wash before you go to bed, you kept complaining about the mud.”

Martha froze in astonishment. Never before had he shown such a degree of consideration for her wellbeing. As long as she was still alive at the end of a dangerous adventure, that was all that mattered. 

“And,” the Doctor continued, patting down his pockets, “I brought this!” He handed her a toothbrush. She took it automatically. The whole situation was absurd, it was like a mirror-world version of that night in Elizabethan London, the night when she’d met William Shakespeare and learned that the Doctor was hung up on a girl who’d left him. 

“Thank you,” she said and almost curtsied in shock. The dress lent itself to curtsying somehow.

“Don’t mention it,” said he, brightly. He threw himself onto the bed. “Oomph! Straw mattress.” He wriggled to make himself comfortable and then resumed his monologue from earlier. “In order to discover what kind of creature has been murdering His Majesty’s finest, we have to consider the victims, as well as the perpetrator. We already know that the murderer is precise, clinical and efficient, yet not necessarily aggressive or hostile. We also know that it’s an alien or has access to alien technology because of the fibres that you found on the body. – Are you going to stand there all night? Your water’s getting cold.”

Martha unfroze. “No.” She realised she’d been clutching the toothbrush he’d handed her in an outstretched hand. “Are you going to… um…” 

He stared at her bleakly. “Oh!” He said as the penny dropped. “Of course. I’ll, um…” He got up and Martha was thrilled to see him actually flustered. His eyes flicked to the door and back to her. Martha wished she weren’t wearing the cloddy sabots. The dress that a few hours previously had made her feel like a fairy-tale princess had become a bulky handicap. 

She almost jumped out of her skin when the Doctor suddenly moved, but he merely walked over to the window, leaned out with his back to her and said: “I’ll just stay here until you’re done.”

And that was it, as simple as that. Martha unbuckled and tugged and pulled and generally fought with the fabric around her, grinding her teeth in wordless fury all the while. She wasn’t sure whether she was shivering with lust or with rage. It was maddening. There she was, in a vulnerable position, with the only man on earth on whom she could absolutely rely to keep his word and remain by the window for as long as she was bathing. It was beyond ironic that he was the only man on earth or indeed in the entire universe whom she really wanted to turn around. 

She pulled off her knickers and lowered herself into the warm water. Never in her life had she so resentfully taken a bath.

There was a knock at the door. A maid sidled in, muttered something, picked up Martha’s dress and disappeared with it before Martha, her heart beating madly, could react. “She said she’s going to clean it,” she mumbled at last, when she had regained control over her wooden tongue. 

“Yes,” the Doctor said simply. He had not budged, had merely turned his head a fraction when the door opened, his shoulder and arm tensing slightly, but relaxed back into the lounging posture once he’d seen that it was only the maid. Martha tried very hard not to stare at his arse and failed. Eventually, she resigned herself to her fate and let her eyes roam over him, defiantly. If he insisted on being the aloof alien, she would take as much advantage of the view afforded to her as she could. Knowing him, he wouldn’t notice she was ogling him even if she did so right under his nose, armed with stalker’s binoculars and reading a book with the title _How to Seduce an Oblivious Time Lord_. 

She brushed her teeth with the water from a cauldron that had been placed above the fire and spit it out into the fire, watching it sizzle and evaporate. The water in her bathtub was getting cold. Only now did something else occur to her.

“Towel,” she said aloud. The Doctor startled.

“Pardon?”

“I don’t have a towel,” she said, feeling stupid. “They didn’t bring one, did they? And they took my dress away.”

He didn’t say a word and, with a feeling that was akin to dread, she watched him take off his jacket, untie his tie and strip off his shirt. He held it out to her without turning around, without looking in her direction. Martha got out of the tub and walked over to him on wobbly knees, leaving puddles of water on the floorboards, desperate to put on the shirt before she’d swoon naked at his feet. She buttoned it up with trembling fingers, pulled her knickers frantically up her wet legs, and jumped into bed where she buried herself under the covers up to her nose. 

The Doctor was still gazing out of the window, while Martha tried out what to say to him in the privacy of her head. ‘I’m in bed,’ was the obvious statement, but she knew she would burst into flames before she could say anything as suggestive as that. She might just be able to croak out ‘ready’, but that wasn’t in any way better. In the end, the settled for: “Are you hoping to spot our extra-terrestrial from the window?”

“Hmm?” He turned around at last and Martha’s bones turned to water. He didn’t have the right to look so human. It would have been so much easier if he’d been green or covered in scales. Had she not learned first-hand that he had two hearts, she would not have believed he was an alien, not now, not when he was looking at her with that unguarded expression on his face. “Oh. No, I don’t think we’ll be so lucky. Whoever the extra-terrestrial is,” he closed the window and walked over to the bed, beautiful in the firelight that cast a warm hue on his pale skin, “it is very good at hiding. We will need more than a stroke of luck to hunt it down.”

Martha shifted away when he lay down, as far away as the narrow bed permitted. This was torture. The Doctor kept talking, of course, and, just like that other night, the first night they’d spent together, the only night they’d spent together, he rolled onto his side, facing her. Martha remained on her back, stiff like a wooden log, clutching fistfuls of the shirt ( _his_ shirt) with clenched hands. 

“I don’t know,” she said at last, without really knowing what he’d been talking about and whether it required an answer. “What would Rose say?”

“What?” The incessant babble stopped and she could feel him trying to burn a hole into her brain with his gaze. “What’s Rose got to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” Martha said, beyond caring. “You said she always knew the right answer.”

“I did?” The astonishment in his voice seemed genuine enough. “When?”

“That night,” Martha cleared her suddenly too-dry throat and then, with a determination born out of desperation, she rolled over to face him as well. “The night when we met Shakespeare. We were… on the bed, and you said that Rose always said the right thing.”

“Oh. Yes, I did, didn’t I?” He smiled, his eyes huge and dark. “That doesn’t mean she always had the right answer, though. She was very good at asking the right question at the right time, to get me thinking along the right lines.”

“And I’m not good at that?” Martha hadn’t meant to sound quite so pitiful.

“You,” he looked her in the eyes, seeing her, actually seeing her, and whispered. “You come up with plenty of answers yourself, Martha Jones.”

It took considerable effort to remind herself that he wasn’t human. He looked human, he felt human, lying so close to her that she sensed the heat rising off his skin, and he smelled human. Martha’s blood was boiling, yet her hands were cold with nerves. She gave a violent start when his fingers brushed against her hand that rested between them under the cover and then wrapped themselves lightly around her wrist. 

“Are you afraid?” he whispered. Martha shook her head, quite unable to speak.

“We are quite safe here,” he continued in the same low, hypnotic whisper. “I don’t expect it will hunt us down. I don’t think it knows it’s being followed.”

Martha didn’t care. That was it, the proverbial final straw, this was more than any woman could take. She pulled her hand out of his grip, pressed it against his chest, rolled over and kissed him.

“Oh.” The Doctor gasped into her mouth. He had yielded to her and was pushing against her at the same time. His mouth was open and the pressure of his lips, the slide of his tongue felt human enough. “Oh!” Suddenly, he laughed, low and delighted, and pulled her close. “I’m very glad you did this,” he muttered against her skin.

“You are?” Martha was so astonished she actually pulled away to look at his face. “You wanted me to? Why didn’t _you_ do it, then?”

“I thought it should be your choice,” he said simply, and Martha kissed him again. Then and there, she did not care whether it was the truth. He had said the right thing, that was good enough for now, and he was doing the right things, too, with his clever hands and his mobile mouth. His hands, his chest were very warm, but the skin of his shoulders and back, where he’d been exposed to the chilly evening air, was cool to the touch. She sampled these sensations, delighted in the way the hairs on his chest brushed against her skin, and she moulded herself to the sharp ridges of his ribs and hipbones. He was very skinny, but it was a firm, steely skinniness underneath which sheer physical strength and skill lay coiled. When he flipped her over, murmuring something against her lips, she fell back quite helplessly, giving herself up to the man above her, whose two hearts beat out a maddening rhythm against her ribcage. Martha was sure what she felt beneath the palms of her hands was the heartbeat of the universe. Her head spun with the insanity of it all; she had been dreaming of it, fantasising about it, fantasising about _him_ , and for once, reality proved more mind-blowing than dreams. For the first time in her life, she experienced sex as a metaphysical event. 

But the moment the Doctor dragged his tongue over her nipple, the sensation of sublime transcendence was gone in a flash, leaving behind pure animal need. He slid deeper, and Martha groaned and grabbed a fistful of his hair, writhing down onto his mouth. She came quickly and easily, almost before she’d expected it. All that tension, the build-up of the last weeks uncoiled abruptly and she arched off the bed and into the heat of him. The Doctor stroked her shuddering thighs, and then he smiled up at her and she saw the light of millions of stars shine behind his eyes.

“Martha Jones,” his voice was low and smoky, an almost physical caress, “you are brilliant.”

“I didn’t do anything,” she protested, watching him settle back beside her, resting his long, slim hand on her stomach. She turned her head to face him fully, just a little bit breathless at the sight of the shining eyes and the wet mouth. “Not yet.”

He leaned in, laughing, and kissed her just above the collarbone. “Mmm. I’m looking forward to it.” The hand on her stomach tightened, his breath ghosted heatedly over her skin with every word he spoke. “Do you want me to sleep with you?”

Did she! There was nothing in the universe she wanted more. But she was a child of her time, a 21st century woman, and a doctor to boot. Shagging an alien, a stranger, a man with a colourful past stretching back over one thousand years without any kind of protection went against all her instincts. Unless he carried condoms in one of his pockets, she would have to forgo that particular pleasure. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said, embarrassed yet holding his gaze. “I don’t want to end up knocked up with a time baby.” As she spoke those words, she realised that she didn’t have a shadow of a doubt that humans and Gallifreyans could reproduce. He was much more than merely human-shaped: hot and sweaty and turned on and dishevelled as he was, he _felt_ human. 

The Doctor laughed. “No, that would certainly complicate matters.” The ‘even more’ hung unspoken in the air. Martha’s heart clenched. She did not want to think about that, not now. There’d be plenty of time to consider the ramifications later.

Slowly, without taking his eyes off her, the Doctor rolled onto his back. Martha followed willingly. ‘Enthralled!’ The word flashed up unbidden in her mind, but she quelled it, focusing on the texture of his skin instead, and on the gasps that escaped him as she continued in her explorations of his body. He groaned deeply when she took him in her mouth, and his cock too felt human and real. She’d wanted to go down on him almost since the moment they’d met. It had been a fleeting thought then, unwelcomed and unprofessional, and she had buried it instantly, but she’d never forgotten the thrill of desire that had run through her when she touched his chest to examine him. There was something about his scent that reeled her in, and she was looking forward to learning what he tasted like.

Delicious, as it turned out. The heady scent that rendered her dizzy and weak-kneed intensified a hundredfold after he’d come. Martha dragged her hands through the moisture that gathered on his stomach, and she rubbed herself against him as she slithered up his body, like a cat rolling in catnip. She pressed her palms against the frantic beat of his two hearts and then let herself fall into his welcoming arms that closed around her in a firm embrace. She was kissing him, too, open-mouthed, urgently, as though attempting to melt into him, praying for the night not to end. Not yet.

It did not. The Doctor’s energy reserves were nigh inexhaustible, and by the time dawn rose outside the window, Martha fell into a lethargic sleep on top of him, her limbs too heavy to move. She woke up with the thrum of his heartbeats reverberating inside her head. 

“Good morning.” His hand moved lazily on her back. “Slept well?”

“What time is it?” Martha didn’t want to move. For a skinny alien, he was surprisingly comfortable. 

“Time to get up and go alien hunting, I’m afraid,” he said. “Your dress is back, much cleaner than it was yesterday from what I saw.”

That jolted her awake. Martha sat up, looking around in confusion. “Someone came in here? And saw us like this? What must they think!”

“Don’t worry!” The Doctor had crossed his hands behind his head and was watching her with laughing eyes. “This is Paris. They’ll just think we’ve gone native.”

Martha fished out her discarded knickers from between the tangled sheets and began dressing herself with trembling fingers, suddenly self-conscious. Searching in vain for her bra, she remembered that she hadn’t been wearing one under the bodice and eyed the dress with distaste. What had possessed her to put it on in the first place? Oh, right, it had been the wish to appear beautiful and desirable in his eyes. Well, the strategy seemed to have worked, but all she wanted now was a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. And most importantly: a pair of trainers. Much more useful when running after monsters. Martha made a mental note to never again try to impress him with her ability to wear uncomfortable shoes.

“Let me help.” He had got up and stepped behind her noiselessly and Martha shivered, stopping in mid-motion in her attempt to pull on the dress. The Doctor kissed her lightly on the shoulder, pulled her bodice into place and began lacing it. “There! You look beautiful.”

“So do you.” The words had left her mouth without pausing to consult her brain. It was true, though. He did. And judging by the smug grin that tugged at the corners of his mouth, he was fully aware of it. 

“I need shoes,” Martha said firmly, determined not to let him disconcert her. “I’m not running after extra-terrestrial murderers in these instruments of torture.”

In the end, she found herself in the possession of a pair of smart leather boots that were supple enough to be comfortable. The Doctor watched her pulling them on. She liked what she read in his eyes, it held the promise that the last night might not remain a one-off after all. 

Getting the boots had been an overall good idea, as it turned out. “It seems we _are_ in luck!” The Doctor whispered, grabbing her arm. Martha had seen it, too, from the corner of her eye: something had moved right on the edge of her peripheral vision. She turned her head, desperate to see it fully, but the Doctor tightened the pressure on her arm and shook his head. “No,” he said quietly. “You won’t be able to see them by looking at them. You’ve got to let them come to you.”

“What, like cats?” Martha whispered back. “Do you know what they are, then?”

“Yes,” he said in the same quiet voice. “Yes, I do. I was wrong, Martha, before. I was wrong. They _did_ hunt us down.”

She had not been frightened before, but she was now. His voice was ancient, weighted down with an infinite sadness.

“What now?” She was beginning to ask, but then there was movement, and it was coming in fast, crashing into her field of vision, and it was-

“Oh my god!” Martha gasped. “What _is_ that thing? Why do real aliens have to look like bad CGI? This is just so… unrealistic!”

“Don’t worry, it’ll look realistic enough once it tries to stab you through the heart. Now: RUN!”

That was the moment when she was really grateful for the boots. 

“Wait, wait, Martha, stop!” They had run into a yard off the rue des Carmes, just outside a cloister. Unlike any other place in Paris, it was quite deserted. “This will do.”

“Do what?”

“I’ve got to talk to them. Let me think, let me think…” He was pacing again. “Oh! Martha, I’ve been stupid. I guessed what they were yesterday, but I was stupid and arrogant and I played a risky game. I shouldn’t have done it. Forgive me.”

“Are we talking about extra-terrestrial monsters or about last night?” Martha was too scared and too disoriented to be gentle with him.

“Both.”

With an almighty woosh, the thing materialised right in front of them. Martha ducked instinctively, but the Doctor stood his ground, gazing up at the hulking monstrosity that shimmered like surface haze just above their heads. Despite its almost ethereal appearance, the thing’s long, vicious spikes looked corporeal enough.

“Doctor!” Martha hissed, realising that he was just standing there, allowing the creature to float closer and closer. “Doctor! Aren’t you going to do anything? Hit it with the Shadow Proclamation!”

“No.” He shook his head without taking his eyes off it. “They don’t know anything about the Shadow Proclamation, they’re much older than that. Oh, I _knew_ they were ancient!”

“You’ve got to do something!” She punched him in the arm, desperate to shake him out of his apathy.

“Listen to me!” The Doctor raised his voice, addressing the shimmering creature. “Listen to me! I’m the Doctor. Like you, I am a member of an ancient race. I understand what you’re doing here, but you have made a mistake. It wasn’t your fault, but you did. Do you understand me? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Watching the creature anxiously, Martha couldn’t tell if it had taken in anything the Doctor said, whether it had the capacity to understand human speech. Time Lord speech. Whatever. The Doctor, however, seemed to think that his words had made an impact.

“Listen to me! You don’t have to do that. This is not what people want. This is not what I want. They don’t want to die.”

Momentarily, the haze gleamed brightly. Its spikes, poised to strike, lowered a fraction. And then, it made a sound. It wasn’t a loud sound, but it reverberated through the yard, through Martha’s body, and it took all her strength not to fall down to her knees under its weight. The Doctor never took his eyes off the thing, and when he answered, it was in a language Martha did not understand. That, more than anything else, told her how utterly alien the creature was.

She couldn’t tell how much time passed until… something happened. The gleam intensified again, flickered brightly, and was gone in a flash, back into a corner tucked away at the edge of her peripheral vision. She blinked very rapidly a couple of times, as if shifting a contact lens into the correct position, and the gleam disappeared entirely. In the next moment, she was by the Doctor’s side, who had sunk to his knees, his face white as a sheet.

“What did you tell them? What was that all about?” She resisted the urge to wrap her arms around him even as she crouched down by him. “What was that thing?”

The Doctor laughed shakily. “That thing, Martha,” he took a deep breath. “That thing is,” he laughed again, “the love child of Thanatos and Eros.”

Martha took a deep breath, and another one, but as he didn’t continue, she prompted: “Meaning what?”

He was still staring into the stretch of empty air where the gleaming creature had hovered moments before, but his face was no longer quite as white. “Thanatos and Eros, the personifications of death and the personification of desire.”

“Doctor! I know what they are. But what does it mean?”

“It means that what we have encountered was the death drive in its corporeal shape.” He shook off her hand from his arm and rose to his feet, brushing dust off his trousers. “They mean no harm,” he continued, without looking at her. “They don’t know the meaning of ‘harm’, they have no concept of aggressiveness or violence. You were spot on when you spoke of a mercy killing: these creatures sense that humans want to die and they… help them.”

“You mean they are walking euthanasia clinics?” Martha said incredulously. “All those men whom they killed, they were suicidal?”

“No.” The Doctor shook his head. “Actually, no. That’s not what I mean. It’s almost impossible to express that concept in human language. They’re a pure and very basic instinct, nothing more.”

“The instinct to die, I got that much. But the instinct to die is not as strong as the instinct to live. My job would be superfluous if it was. And most suicide attempts are cries for help.”

“Oh, Martha.” He looked very ancient and very sad again. “Those men who died here. They don’t seek death by suicide. But seek it they do: they throw themselves into battle, hoping for glory but settling happily for death if glory is not forthcoming. They think nothing of losing their life, but as long as they’re alive, they pursue women like there’s no tomorrow. Wenching and wine, Martha. A Baroque glorification of opulence and earthly pleasures on the one hand, and the fetishisation of death and decay on the other. Those creatures-“

“Don’t they have a name?”

“No. They’re older than any naming conventions. As I said, they’re the embodiment of pure instinct. That’s why I was worried they would not understand me, they have no concept of choice, let alone of right or wrong. Listen, Martha!” Suddenly intense, he grabbed her upper arms and pulled her towards him. “They don’t understand anything. You don’t understand anything. The impulse to seek death is as strong as the impulse to avoid it. Eros and Thanatos walked side by side long before the days when humanity was still figuring out what shape its fundamental beliefs would take.” He let go of her arms and frowned. “The Greek names are meaningless of course, I’m only using them, because they make it easier to explain the whole thing.”

“You’re not doing a great job.”

“No, I guess not. But you grasp the general concept.”

“I think I do.” She shivered. “You said they hunted us down. Why did they come after us? I don’t seek death-“ she broke off, staring at him, terrified.

“No,” he said gently. “No, you don’t. 

“Last night,” Martha said. “Last night, when you- No, on second thought, I don’t want to know.” She turned away from him and walked off, back into the direction from where they’d come.

“Martha!” He came running after her and fell into step beside her. “Last night,” he said eventually, after they’d walked in silence for a while. “Don’t question what happened last night. What you felt then was real.”

“I know that!” Martha said, anger rising up in her at his patronising assumption that she had to be reassured. “I know my own feelings.”

“No, I mean… What you felt… how you felt about me…” He broke off, frowning, attempting to untangle the ideas he wished to express. “How you felt that I felt about you. That was real.”

He meant well, she knew that, but the way he tackled the subject was oddly humiliating. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much his words or his clumsy way of talking about human emotions, but the awareness that her desire for him was stronger that his desire for her. His desires were darker and deeper, they were older than anything she knew and impossible to satisfy. 

With a sudden pang, she regretted not having slept with him after all. Perhaps the risk of contracting an intergalactic STD or giving birth to a Gallifreyan baby would have been worth it. The thought that that’d been it, her once-in-a-lifetime chance, was infuriating. But that wasn’t his fault, either. She did not actually think he’d orchestrated the whole thing. No, she very definitely and pointedly did not.

“You never said: what did you tell that creature? How did you get it to leave?” Changing the subject was making it easy for him, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself.

“I didn’t. It lost interest in me because it sensed that-“ he shot her a sideways glance. “That it would not be a mercy kill in my case. It’s still around, though. I couldn’t stop it, I could only slow it down. My weapon are words and reason, and you can’t reason with a power as primal as that.”

“So us coming here was a failure, then,” she stated bitterly.

The Doctor seized her hand. “No. No, of course it wasn’t.” 

It looked like she’d got her wish after all: he was strolling hand in hand with her through the narrow streets of Paris, past cobblers and coopers, bagmen and beggars, mercers and milliners and countless others whose professions she couldn’t name. It wasn’t exactly romantic, not with the smell of the city hovering around them and the seemingly unlimited supply of pickpockets on every corner, but it was real. The Doctor bought… well, bartered… well, wheedled out some sweet pastry from a baker whose stall they passed, which turned out to be made of pure sugar with a generous helping of fat. They ate it laughing like children and licked the sugar off their fingers.

In the shadows before them, the familiar blue box shone against the backdrop of ramshackle houses. The Doctor tightened his grip of her hand. “Come on, Martha Jones. Let’s go home.” He stopped by the blue door, leaned against the TARDIS wall with one shoulder, looming over her in familiar fashion, with smiling eyes. “Go on. Open it.” A key suddenly dangled between them, the door got unlocked and the TARDIS welcomed them with open arms. Martha took a deep breath, tension draining from her body. The Doctor was already interacting with the shiny controls, petting them like a man coming home from work would pet the dog who’d been waiting for him all day. Only perhaps slightly more… suggestive.

He was smiling at her across the room. “Are you going to stand there all day? Tell me where you want to go next, and then let us get you out of that dress.” He looked her up and down. “I’ve never seen such a bunch of rags.” Martha threw her reticule at him. “Ouch!” He rubbed his head and shot her a look that went straight to her knees. “You can keep the boots though.”

It was no good, she would never be able to resist. That smile of his was infections. Martha broke out in a smile, too, and bounded over to the console. “Where will you take me next, Doctor?” she asked, matching his playful tone. “Past, present or future?” She would not let herself second-guess the choices she’d made nor worry about the choices that were yet to come. For as long as she travelled with the Doctor, all that would count for her would be the Now.


End file.
